ENDINGS

The hell grew larger as the illusions broke

NEW YORK, SUNDAY NOVEMBER 10, 1946

Letters—work on lectures

Cocktails

Movies, Hugo, Eduardo

The lesbians seek me out

NOVEMBER 11, 1946

Letters

Gonzalo

Exhibition—Crosby

Early to bed

Depression began

Helba answering telephone instead of Gonzalo, screaming instantly: “I will kill you all. Go to hell!”

I made heroic efforts with Staff to conquer the illness. I detached myself from Gonzalo, from Hugo, from Gore, from Bill, from all to stand in a kind of desert as the saints did in their search for god, and so I, in my search for love, have reached nothing but a desert. At first I wept, mourned over the dead selves.

There was a fear: before—I had illusions, and then hell, and the hell grew larger as the illusions broke. But now I have nothing, for I no longer have my illusions of Hugo. He was a man who had repressed the natural part of himself and therefore had died. But as he began to come to life under Dr. Bogner’s care, everything erupted in great violence. He emerged an angry man—Jehovah, as I called him, still deifying him, the angry father-god, angry and rebellious, rebelling against supporting Gonzalo. Each time he became angry, I felt guilty, crushed, unloved. I wanted to run away from home as I did when I was five years old, but I took his side and struggled desperately to wean Gonzalo off Hugo’s money. The press collapsed under a mountain of debts, corroded by Gonzalo’s irresponsibility. Even when it was time to move out, it was I who did all the packing, sorting, cleaning. Gonzalo took the small press home. I went away alone, broken in health and seeking strength elsewhere. Hugo demanded to be master of the situation—he would wean Gonzalo, but he couldn’t. The only thing Gonzalo did was sell his books, pawn his clothes and his typewriter. Hugo gave him money only for food (because Hugo himself was in debt). When I returned to Gonzalo to give him food, everything was lost, the passion, the faith, nothing left but human fraternity, ashes. Gonzalo thinks I broke with him because of his jealousy of Gore, but it was the attempt to end his parasitism.

In the summer, at East Hampton, I fell in love with John Paanacker, a beautiful boy of twenty-three, driven insane by the war, and his behavior (just like Bill’s, tenderness and sadism) nearly drove me insane. I saw John as the continuation, the expansion of Bill, even born on the same day! I returned shattered, having walked through the inhuman East Hampton at night, sleepless, weeping hysterically. Staff knew this was only the violent culmination of the illness. Then, upon resuming analysis and my activities, I had days of faith, days of peace, days when my improved relation to the world promised an improved intimate relationship. But to live this unromantic life without passion and ecstasy, merely because I could no longer bear the infernos which always followed, is worse than death.

Curious contradiction: while my personal life sank like a pierced ship, there was a great ascension in my work. When Ladders to Fire appeared October 21, three hundred people came to the Gotham Book Mart and fêted me as one dreams they would, each one carrying several copies of the book for me to sign for themselves, for friends. Thrusting, admiring faces, deep glances of worship, words of faith.

Those three days were symbolic and proved to me that the world for which I am writing is topographically much larger than I thought, rounder and vaster, and that the young writers of the future will waste less of their strength as mere surveyors of it.

Three more parties at book shops. People did not offer ordinary compliments, but their souls, a silent votive offering of their deepest feelings, and that reduced the sting of a vulgar Sunday Times book review, of Diana Trilling’s implacable anger, of Leo Lerman’s betrayal: “You should lie low and hide after all this scandal about lesbianism. You attend too many parties…” etc. Jealousies sprouting like venomous mushrooms. But letters and manuscripts come from new friends every day.

Staff called me up with a voice of lucidity during the din of Gotham to say, “Have faith.” Oh, I have faith, but my vulnerability, which is my instrument of creation, the sensibility which is the very vibration of my writing, rejects the ugliness, anger, distortion, and wants to retreat from this exposure.

The stupidity of Wilson and all the reviewers only accentuates the lack of understanding. But other people respond: the young. So I know I’m right.

I don’t miss Gore—he is like the others now, just one of my sons. My heart is closed against Bill. I do not feel him. But I can’t bear this life without a great passion, for which I am made. To have reached recognition, fame even, at such a moment. I flowed emotionally to Bill Burford because his writing is the twin of mine, but he was frightened because he is homosexual.

NOVEMBER 15, 1946

People are reading in The New Yorker that Wilson thinks I have “made progress in the new part of the book, and although the story is a little amorphous, there are charming things in it,” etc.! People are talking about me, people are thinking about me, but at five o’clock—a fatal hour when the buses are so full that you cannot climb into them, when the taxis will not stop, when the subway is impossible to enter, when everyone is running somewhere, when the lovers have chosen each other, when I am stranded at a corner of a street, unable to reach home, unable to reach anyone—I feel this wave of choking anguish: loneliness, loneliness, loneliness.

There is no change in the diary. I wanted it not neurotic, but I see something is still wrong, for I felt pain while writing it and a desire to evade the pain. I only wrote it out of loneliness…

To love out of loneliness, to write out of loneliness is not good.

I cannot be alone.

Waves of anguish choke me.

It is too late for analysis to cure me totally.

I have terrible moments.

What has happened is that instead of writing in the diary, I now want to talk to someone or write to someone, to be related, to give of myself, to exchange. But I am forced back here. What can I say to Bill Pinckard? He has paralyzed me by not answering my letters. He and Gore killed my spontaneity. They are too small to contain me. Gore gives me the feeling that I disturb his peace and isolation like a raging storm. Such meager letters he writes, such a small life. Flight.

Pauvres enfants! I am too rich for them. I remember when I first began to receive the flood of Henry’s letters. Torrents of words. How rich I felt! How overwhelmed, so overwhelmed I couldn’t answer. I felt submerged, but I enjoyed it. Perhaps it is feminine to like to be overwhelmed, to be swept off one’s feet.

Alors, mon cher journal. Me voici du nouveau. Twenty years of illusory loves and passions, and here I am, back to where I once was:

To solitude

To monologues

Soliloquies

Communion with myself

Because everywhere I turned was pain, incompleteness, sacrifice, self-destruction.

NOVEMBER 18, 1946

For days I was copying the diary in which Albert appeared, longing for him desperately. One day, in desperation and frustration against the emptiness of my life, I lied to Gore that Albert had come on a diplomatic mission, that he was here. (I wanted to punish Gore for his inadequacy, or perhaps it was to sustain my own need of life.) I survived two weeks with the myth of Albert, and then, unable to sustain it, I explained my depression to Gore by having Albert return to Haiti.

And today Albert telephoned!

Awaiting him, I admonished my heart: be careful, be quiet, do not hope, do not let joy flood you… It may be a dream…another dream.

But when he stood at the door, my heart lost its caution and opened my arms! We kissed feverishly. We tried to talk…but couldn’t. I was overwhelmed with happiness.

Anaïs, je te veux…

I couldn’t believe the simplicity of it. After three years! “Anaïs, I want you…” And the richness of his mouth, the vigor, the voluptuousness of his body… Three years without this richness, this utter abandon and enjoyment, the caresses… Aï, Aï, Aï, he moans. How he takes me, how he ploughs into me, how he enters, fills me, strong and voluptuous.

“Anaïs!” he cried, “I thought you’d forgotten about me.”

“You are not easy to forget.”

He said, “Three years…they have been cut short…now they don’t seem so long...”

He fell asleep.

But there is sadness in this meeting, a passion which was mutilated at its peak— can it survive? There is angoisse at the bottom… He hurt me before, accepted the obstacles between us, yielded to conventions, had the courage to leave me, and did. Yet this is what I want. He is the match to my physical self, the only match to my nature, my island nature, my tropical nature, and nature was sacrificed.

He is sad. He is no longer the golden boy. He is thirty years old, an active communist, not romantic, but a Marxist, sincere, simple. He is married to his childhood friend, to the fiancée who waited eight years for him. He has a child.

Let me enjoy this…enjoy this…

Garden of Eden

Albert:

We sink into caresses, with tenderness, with strength, with drunkenness, with richness, softness, fire, honey, flesh.

Oh the paradise of nature

Of sweet flesh

Of unashamed desire

Albert, my island, my song…

So sweet and so present.

He stands erect with the pride of his beauty.

He is hungry, he is caressing, he is free.

I can write now.

Not a diary, but a song.

Sweet flesh, Sweet…

He came this morning.

Always desire, a brushing of lips becomes a trembling of pleasure and his manhood is aroused…

He wants. He takes. He takes time. He plunges. He enjoys.

He tastes.

He is perfect, like a leaf, like rain, like dew, like a tree, like a storm.

He has sad thoughts, a sad face. Why? Because he has negro blood, because he stands between two worlds, rejected by the communist party in Haiti for his light skin.

He looks like the son of Gonzalo, paler. He works at the U.N.

Saturday:

At the center lie fire and the earth

I am at peace

Where there was emptiness there is now fullness

I can work

I am not cheated by life

His warmth is in me

His blood

His cries

His enjoyment

I am rich

Oh, his flesh, so full and firm. He is all roundness and firmness, so beautifully made, so rich to taste, his strong odor, male and bitter, and rich…

Garden of Eden—Now I have the sea, the sun, and I can write, work, sleep.

Albert, I am grateful to you. I am far from perversions, decadence, complication, paralysis. So far from Gore, the paralytic, the sick.

Sweet Albert

For him the simple words

Acts

So little talk, none needed

The drug

The sweet, natural drug

I have lost my sickness, I have lost my anxiety, I feel calm…

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1946

I work at being at peace. At the moment, I have no anxiety…in between anxiety is the inferno and the sickness. Albert is there, but I fear a blow. Instead of anxiety, there is an inner resignation—something has broken my exaltation. To not fall as dangerously, I do not soar as high…

NOVEMBER 29, 1946

An evening at Albert’s hotel…such sensuality, yet I am still frigid. I have always been with Albert, and I cannot understand it. I am not so with Chinchilito, yet I like Albert better and have more desire and tenderness for him.

“Why? Why?” I ask Staff. He cannot answer yet, but he thinks any relationship I have now would be incomplete because the eroticism caused by my illusions has disappeared. I know this is not a complete relationship, and I don’t want it. It is once again stolen moments filled with obstacles. He lives outside of the city, and he comes here rarely. We are not spiritually or mentally attached. It is too partial, too…I don’t know…based in reality, and the reality is that he is too calm, too passive for me, like a plant. There is no real contact.

DECEMBER 11, 1946

I left Tuesday, the 3rd, for my tour of the colleges.

At Harvard, I stayed at Carlton Lake’s house. Carlton is a cultured, intelligent, sincere man, interested for many years in my work, starting a publishing house.

A real friendship.

But I want to understand this: I give myself to the situation. The present becomes the center. I take an interest in Carlton, in his way of life. I enter his and his wife’s lives, secrets, hungers. I felt for his wife, who is intellectually inadequate but childlike and real, and helped her to have confidence, took her fears away. The entire scene becomes vivid, near, glowing…I experience their lives with them…I feel warm and close to them. It all glows with humanity, with understanding. But why does my parting dissolve them? As I leave, I could easily forget them, though we exchanged feelings, a part of ourselves.

And that is why so many people claim a relationship with me, and while it is real for me at the time, afterwards they dissolve and fade away. This frightened me: the intense reality of my two days and two nights spent in Carlton’s house, the confidences, and how it becomes so easily effaced for me.

On the 4th I spoke at the Poetry Room of Harvard’s Widener Library. The lecture and reading were received with great absorption, not a rustle of inattention. I wore a black dress and a vivid fuchsia scarf. I spoke strongly and read well. I won many people, even some of the prejudiced ones.

The next day I left for Dartmouth, and the following morning I spoke at the auditorium to 400 students, and again I captured their full attention. Professor Herbert West said it moved him to see me so slight and small facing this hall full of men.

And all the time I was thinking that the height of my trip was going to be Bill Burford. I forgot about Albert, I forgot about my triumphs. Burford had sent me two telegrams, one eager, wanting to meet my train, the other an imaginative answer to my sending him a seahorse. And when I opened his telegram, I got a feeling of warmth and intimacy, but it is as if this feeling were transferable, no longer personal. As with Henry, it runs like a river, it is not fixed on one person, does attempt to fix itself, and when faced with an obstacle (in Burford’s case, homosexuality) it is easily deviated.

I dare not risk another shattering.

At Dartmouth I saw so many desirable and beautiful men, but none in the sensitive way of Bill Pinckard or in the dark, fiery way of Burford.

After Dartmouth, I went to Goddard College. Every hour of the trip, every meal, was filled with questions from students, a constant “interview.” I learned to talk freely, to parry attacks, to resist intellectualization, to answer irrelevant questions.

Exhaustion.

After a long, five-hour drive to Amherst, I stayed at James Merrill’s place, and Bill Burford came. We had dinner with champagne, were happy, talking fabulously, freely.

Bill is nineteen, was born in Texas on February 20. He is tall, manly-looking, dark hair, and intense dark eyes. His face is rough-hewn, and his sensibility is only betrayed by his eyes and his hands. There is something feminine about his appearance. He is immature only in his anxiety and his stuttering. Being with Jimmy made everything more difficult, but at the same time Jimmy has a playfulness and humor which relieved the tension of Bill’s tremendous anxiety.

All through the trip I felt I was traveling to reach him, all the little waves of vibrancy converged towards him, but this time poor Anaïs is afraid and pauses before the obstacle of his homosexuality.

When word got out that I was there, strangers began to appear. Bill was angry, and I was too.

DECEMBER 21, 1946

I work on Volume II of Cities of the Interior.

I throw myself into sensuality with Albert. It is not like my drugged hours with Pinckard, but something more animal, more real, more sexual and less erotic. Albert’s body has less eroticism—it is more sexual, more concentrated. I love the way he moves his sex in my mouth, how he sighs and moans. Today I became roused by his hands while I kissed his penis and had an orgasm from his caress, a caress only Henry used to give me at times, the fingers in both my sex and my anus.

“Comme tu caresse bien, comme tu fais ça bien, Anaïs.”

Then, erotically roused, we took our clothes off and he said, “I want to take you in every way possible,” as if he wanted to pierce me with his sex everywhere at once. I love how he lingers outside of the womb, sliding his wet penis all over, around it, the folds, between the legs, the anus, arousing all the regions between the legs, tantalizing me, and his vital, vital taking me afterwards. I gave myself this time, sank into it, enjoyed him. I was happy. Relaxed.

People are miserable and tense because they don’t make love enough.

I felt as if I had been swimming or running, relaxed and content…

DECEMBER 1946

Letter from Hugo in Cuba:

Darling:

I still can’t bear the thought of hurting you. Please forgive me. I love you more than ever, but with a self that is just beginning to find out who he is. That person is different from you, but he is in love with you.

Remember that always, because if you will be patient, this new love will be far stronger than the old.

Your Hugo

Bill Howell. He looks like a photograph of my father when my father was twenty years old. The same sensitive features, the small nose, the feminine smile, the boyish, slender body. But my nights with him put a painful end to my sensual frenzies. He was suffering from a break with his girlfriend and was fearful of loving me, fearful of a relationship, yet yielding, perverse, jealous.

Our last night together, he got drunk, flirted with a girl, and I felt he would not return with me since we are not lovers, we are not bound, and it is natural. But I couldn’t bear it. I was so full of anguish I could not enjoy the party… We agreed I would go home alone with a friend and he would follow later. I felt deserted, betrayed, neurotic again. But he did come and was gentle, sweet, tender. “I would never hurt you or endanger what we have for the sake of a little whoring!” He lay beside me with his small, straight nose against my breast.

I was grateful for his not harming me. He was there. He was human and tender. I had expected callousness (oh the fear of cruelty!). I was at peace.

The fear of loss and betrayal had not materialized.

One night, he called me up to tell me that he met Hazel McKinley at a party, got drunk and slept with her. This, after having told me a while ago that “she is repulsive” and that he did not want to see her. He said: “It was gruesome. I hate myself. I hate her. I never want to see her again. Oh, honey, honey, honey, don’t cry—oh, don’t—I can’t bear that. My feelings for you are growing and growing and growing. You must understand that I couldn’t be casual with you, as you asked me to be. We would have to be involved. I respect you too much. You are too wonderful. I couldn’t treat you as I treated Hazel.”

Hugo came home from Cuba this evening.

JANUARY 1947

This hunger is unsatiated because it is no longer disguised as a hunger for the marvelous, but as a simple hunger of the body, one that is unsatisfied by Hugo for whom I have no desire, unsatisfied by the intermittent visits from Albert, unsatisfied by the smaller constellations of effusive relationships to Gore, Pablo, Bill Howell, all of which are insubstantial.

A day:

Gonzalo comes at eleven. When I say our love is dead, he denies it, but it is so clear that all we hold together is a wake for a dead relationship, a wistful wake, sometimes a violent one in which I, realizing fully all that he has destroyed, break into sudden frenzied sobbing and he looks blind, baffled.

Any “job” in New York is impossible because of his anarchism and his real handicap of being Helba’s nursemaid. He will not go to Peru to claim his inheritance because he can’t bear the thought of his mother seeing him in his humiliating poverty-stricken state. Although I would raise the money for him to go to France, he won’t go without seeing his mother first. So he won’t go to Peru, he won’t go to France, and he can’t find or keep a job. In three weeks the charity organization Hugo helped arrange will stop making him payments. He has not telephoned about two job prospects, he has not written to his mother, he has not written to France, and he lies on my couch inert, weak and fireless. I ask myself how I did I ever turn to this sick, sick, sick primitive for fire, a fire in the center of his being that I now can see is useless, raging, blind and destructive, a fire leading nowhere, a wasted fire.

At twelve Gore telephones. The day he came back from Guatemala we fused emotionally like two soft rivers. He said, “I made a house for us…” And then he said, “I have not been as happy for two months as I am right now.” And, dipping in this happiness, with his childish and none-too-warm penis, he carries his limited supply of sensuality to an Irish boy, and a few days later he has lost the healthy glow of Guatemala, looks pale, has rings under his eyes.

At two o’clock I get a telegram from Bill Burford. Just as much as his writing is orderly, minute, perfect, his handwritten letters are chaotic and mad… He is unlike Gore: not nearly as human or simple, but complicated and perverse. But the friction and spark between our two imaginations generate writing, our only thread.

At three o’clock Staff and I are still unraveling my first humiliation at the hands of man (my father’s violent spankings) and my slavery to it.

At four o’clock I receive a love letter from Bill Pinckard, which inundates me with pleasure and balances the pain he has inflicted.

At nine o’clock we are off to a New Year’s party where I still pursue the echo of John Paanacker in Bill Howell…another mirage where all of us, drunk, indulged in effusions of caresses and wild words—love, love, love, love, love, love. I stayed away from the party where Gore was because there is no physical effusion there and my body is frustrated… So I deserted him as the most painful of all relationships (we are only happy alone because then we give each other the illusion of possessing each other, but in the world it is clear we do not, since any stranger can lay hold of our bodies).

Fell asleep sad that I am living in fragments in spite of a greater wholeness, greater stability, greater confidence, lessened anxiety, lessened fears.